Chihuahua Flats

a short story

by Michael Bishop

In a dusty panel truck with a slack transmission and no
spare, Dougan bumped into the cactus-lapped verges of Chihuahua Flats.
He came nudged by a fitful Texas sirocco, desperate to
expand his territory. Behind him, in the cargo bay, a dozen or more
economy-size bags of N.R.G. Chunx in slick double-lined red paper, the
dogfood itself dry as potsherds and frangible as old biscuits.

Even over the engine's banging and backfires, Dougan, his good ear
cocked, could hear a deranging insect rustle in two or three of the
bags. Well. So what? How much could the blamed roach borers eat?

About a block from the kennel, he began to brake. He rode the rubberless
pedal or else he fiercely pumped it. The truck squealed in the gust-driven
desert blow, jounced in a perpetual sand scour; when it shuddered to
a rolling ebb, Dougan wrestled it into the crazed adobe driveway of
the kennel to which he had pointed it these past howevermany hours.
Dead on the ground, Dougan's truck neither sighed nor swayed.

The sprawling house had a whitewashed mission look. Behind it, cockeyed
on the rattlesnake-peopled steppe, blazed a three-story concrete run
with a roof of terra-cotta macaroni halves.

Dougan pushed the door buzzer and got back through the wall a lizardly
metallic hiss. The sweat-plastered hair on his nape struggled to stand,
giving him an almost pleasant chill -- so he buzzed again, and then
again, leaning with his decent ear hard to the doorframe.

Come around! You got to come around! said a speaker unit next to him,
a grill like an Aztec medallion.

Miss?

Come around! This so piercingly that Dougan nigh on to stumbled
off the porch. He recovered, though, and circled on a hurried limp to
the fenced-in compound out back.

I'm Millie Chalverus, said the woman at the gate. Who are you? Whaddaya
want? N why should I care?

She had green eyes bracketed by hard-to-see laugh lines, skin like
coffee-colored suede, and, shoehorned into a pair of ebony-and-gold-embroidered
pedal pushers, a haunch like a ripening matador's. A velvety black haltertop
crossed her upper torso. Her toenails peered up at Dougan from her scuffed
huaraches like lacquered violets. Ankles, midriff, shoulders, arms:
continents of glistening suede.

Miss? Dougan's eyes bounced. A bowel south of his navel went slack
and took on a windy cargo of doubt. So much skin. Such lakegreen eyes.
A mouth you could press a kiss on thout ever quite reachin her teeth.

By the way, Dougan. It's mam, not miss. I got a little too much age
on me to truckle to miss.

Sorry, Dougan said.

Yeah. Well. Don't sweat it.

Beneath him, a quick yip and a helium-high growl. A dog no bigger than
a heifer's stool had reared up against the chainlink gate. It had raised
its paltry brindle hackles, and the fudge pools of its eyes stuck out
like a mantis's. Dougan could have snapped off those eyes and sent the
dog on a looping fieldgoal arc by slamming his boot against the gate.
Except for Millie Chalverus, he would have surrendered to the idea and
launched the mutt.

Conchos, huh? Hey, Conchos, howya doin? Dougan knelt in front of the
dog. He moved a forefinger toward Conchos with a thought to rubbing
his nose through the mesh, but Conchos leapt against the gate, snarling
and pogo-sticking. Dougan fell over sideways.

Chalverus chortled. Dougan brushed himself off.

Guess if Conchos don't like me, you don't either, he said. Guess
I got as much chanst to sell you on my bidnus as I do to drop me a baby
nex Friday.

Don't give up so quick.

Mam?

Conchos cain't judge character worth a sue. Why, he'd bite Mother Teresa
on the tush n lay a sloppy wet one on a liar like Ollie North.

Dougan blinked in the magnesium glare of the sun. To the northwest,
a hawk floated between Chalverus's stockade and the salmon and mint
ridges of a distant rampart. Below Dougan's left eye, a tic began to
cycle.

If Conchos don't like you, you must be okay.

No shit? Dougan turned crimson. His last word rang in the air like
a bell. No lie. I meant, no lie.

In the oven of his cargo bay, Dougan wrestled with the dogfood bags.
He scrutinized them all for punctures, tears, and bore holes, then selected
out a bag as glossily seamless as the Messiah's robe. This one he toted
in a Groucho Marx crouch back to the kennel.

As soon as the Chalverus woman let him in, Conchos seized his trouser
cuff, snarling through clenched teeth and flapping like a pennant on
his instep until they reached a feeding area under a wide green plastic
awning. All along the three-tiered run next to it, a chorus of unseen
caged Chihuahuas whimpered and yipped.

Chalverus cried, Let go, Conchos. Let go!

Conchos released Dougan's cuff, reared like Trigger, and scuttled holus-bolus
away, fussing without relent. Grateful, Dougan lowered the dogfood bag
and bent over it like a soldier over a gutshot buddy.

Thanks, he said. Much bliged. It jes gits hotter. As if to prove this
remark, clammy drooping semicircles had bloomed under his workshirt's
arms, big cancerous splotches. He split the bag with his pocketknife
and doled out onto the concrete a handful -- a prodigal double handful
-- of N.R.G. Chunx, brickred pellets craggy as owlcasts and burly as
paperweights. Conchos pricked his ears, tilted his head, scented the
spill, skipped from foot to foot like a balsawood puppet. Several Chihuahuas
on the tiers, also smelling the food, began to yammer and bay, a doggy
munchkin chorale.

Awright, Dougan told Conchos. Come git yore picnic.

Conchos looked at Dougan, then at Chalverus, then at the mound of N.R.G.
Chunx. Go on, Chalverus said. I don't mind. Have yoreself a go. So Conchos
tiptoed over and tried to mouth a chunk, but not one in the pile was
less than half the size of his head. Conchos could not even crack a
piece with a forepaw on it to hold it down. Stymied, he danced a bemused
do-si-do, looking up again at Chalverus.

You must feed these boulders to St. Bernards, she said. Or starvin
African pachyderms.

We give you a lot for yore money.

Well. It's useless to me if Conchos n his sort cain't eat it. N it
shore as shivers looks like they cain't.

Wait, said Dougan. Jes you wait. Outside the run, he saw a steppingstone
long and wide as a breadloaf. Gimme a minit, okay? He wedged himself
through the kennel gate while holding it ajar with an outstretched leg,
prised up the stone, and eased back through the gate with it before
him at groin height, an honest-to-Jesus threat to herniate him. See,
he said. See, now. He dropped the stone on the N.R.G. Chunx, picked
it up, dropped it again. He put one boot sole on the stone and ground
it from side to side. There. See. He nudged the stone aside, disclosing
a pile of rubbly fragments and a scatter of brickred powder.

Conchos pitter-pattered up and fell to. He chewed what he could, cracking
the kibbles in his jaw teeth, and licked what he couldn't. He did a
little jig as he ate.

Looks thet way, Chalverus said. But am I myself gonna have to pulverize
ever bag I decide to buy?

Nome. No way. Place you a long-term order n I promise you plenty of
prepulverized N.R.G. Chunx whenever you ast.

Deal, Chalverus said.

She and Dougan shook hands. Her palm and fingers, Dougan noted, had
a breezy dry silkiness. Even her calluses had a well-cared-for feel,
as if she refused to allow the desert any tyrannical say-so over the
expression of her womanhood. What a find, thought Dougan.

On Christmas Eve, four months later, Dougan married Millie
Chalverus in a Catholic ceremony in the den of her house on the outskirts
of Chihuahua Flats. About seven years back, she had lost her previous
husband, Joseph Worrill, to an oilfield fire between Midland and Odessa,
Texas. Starting up Chihuahua Flats Kennels had rescued her from the
blues and maybe even poverty, for the biggest part of Mr. Worrill's
insurance money had gone to cover a slagheap of outstanding debts. Dougan
cared nothing for the petty facts of Chalverus's past life, particularly
her marriage and any earlier romances -- except insofar as her past,
sprouting up as memory or as unfinished business, derailed her happiness
or blighted his and her itemhood. Even today, the rolling gravel in
her laugh and her skin's swarthy flush could make Dougan swoon standing
up.

I do, Chalverus had said, keeping her own name, as she had kept it
with Mr. Worrill (for business purposes and to feed her soul). Anyway,
at that I do, Dougan had begun to live -- to live in sweet truth
-- for the first time since his release from Dooly Correctional Institution
in Unadilla, Georgia, where he'd spent five years on a DUI unlawful-death
conviction. (Driving blotto on cheap corn liquor in Macon, he had fender-glanced
with his pickup an old woman walking home. Except for a vicious bump
to his right ear, he had killed her without half noticing.) Even operating
his own shoestring kennel-supply business in Lubbock had failed to drain
from Dougan a melancholy unease, and this subtly toxic ache had poisoned
him on every long-distance haul through the panhandle or across the
hot alkaline flats of the Jornada del Muerto. But one I do had
changed that, nullifying the poison.

Dougan abandoned Lubbock. He threw over his kennel-supply business.
Chihuahua Flats Kennels had work enough for two, and Millie Chalverus,
now his beloved wife, had no objection to his coming aboard and shouldering
a man-sized moiety of the labor. He toted bags of Chihuahua chow, hosed
down the runs, patched gaps in the chainlink, replaced fallen roof tiles,
and haggled at the doorstoop with jewelry-freighted high-pressure salesguys
besotted with their own stale hormones and decades of worn-out macho
propaganda. And so, in many ways, the union of Vernester Dougan and
Millie Chalverus seemed to Dougan the recipient of a sure-nough heavenly
blessing.

Conchos, though, never came around. He despised Dougan. He yapped whenever
Dougan entered the house. He tried to guard the master bedroom against
Dougan's certain arrival. Failing that, Conchos fell back to protect
the bed itself, an immense two-layer wheel under a spread of the same
embroidered fabric from which Chalverus had made the pedal pushers in
which Dougan had first beheld her delectable croup.

Yip yip yip, went Conchos, yap yap yap, meanwhile snarling his outrage
and prancing in strategic if hopeless retreat. Dougan wore heavy suede
gloves to deal with Conchos and always picked him up and moved him aside
whenever such run-ins took place. It annoyed him, Conchos's implacable
hatred along with all the silly-ass threats, but Dougan never -- not
once since the day of his first N.R.G. Chunx delivery -- felt the least
urge to strangle Conchos, dropkick him into orbit, or render him unpeelable
roadkill. Dougan had resolved not to hurt Conchos because Chalverus
loved Conchos and what Chalverus loved Dougan respected unconditionally.

You don't have to, Dougan said. I respec whatsoever you love n'll try
to love it myself n hope thet one day Conchos'll take to me too.

Although Dougan heard the nobleness of this pronouncement, he found
that in town for his weekly haircut he had a hard time being faithful
to it. Pete Mosquero, his barber, liked to rag him about Conchos:

You don look to me like a Chihuahua esorta guy.

No?

No. I jess refuse to blieve you like em.

I don't, Dougan said, but --

You see, I magine you an Espringer espaniel esorta guy or mebbe a golden
retriever.

Thanks, but --

As I esee em, Chihuahuas are estupid popeyed prisses, n you got too
much class to be messin widdem.

They've got their points.

Yeah. On the ends of their ears. Mosquero laughed at his own joke,
sclipping his scissors to punctuate it.

Back out at the kennels, Conchos's despisal of Dougan went unallayed.
The dog chewed holes in his jockey shorts, shat in his Sunday oxfords,
peed on the mahogany valet that Chalverus had given him as a wedding
gift, and either strewed about the house or punctured irreparably every
foil-wrapped condom in a box of three dozen that Dougan had bought at
Best Buy Drugs. Conchos scrabbled at the bedroom door every time Dougan
and Chalverus grew amorous. When they declined to admit him and made
love to spite him, Conchos stood in the hall baying like a plangently
deflating balloon. If they did admit him, Conchos straddled Dougan's
back and aimed penetrating nips at his nape and shoulder blades. This
misbehavior had earned Conchos the sharpest scolding he'd ever got in
Dougan's hearing and a quick exile to the utility room.

Couldn't we jes kennel him when we git frisky? Dougan said.

Why?

I lose concentration.

I don't. Mmm. Mmm mmm mmm.

S different for a man.

Yeah? Howso?

But Dougan could think of no explanation that did not imply that he
might surrender total focus on her even in the throes of climactical
passion. So Conchos remained indoors, if not in their bedroom, even
when Cupid attacked.

Outside the boudoir, Conchos played other games. He sat on the couch
between Chalverus and Dougan. He guarded his daily allotment of N.R.G.
Chunkletz -- Chihuahua-sized pieces that the company had begun producing
for smaller breeds -- as if fearful that Dougan might hijack it and
eat it himself. Conchos never carried any of his rubber squeak toys
or his leash to Dougan, and on early-morning winter walks through the
cacti he refused to take a dump until Dougan's lips had visibly blued
and his bladder had grown as taut as a volleyball. Often, once Dougan
had unzipped and made steam, Conchos would give in and unload, eyeballing
him from a crayfishing squat that only a smart aleck could have choreographed.

Little dog, Dougan would say, you make me sad.

But not sad enough to go back to the bottle. And, setting aside the
hatred of one muleheaded Chihuahua, he viewed his new life with Chalverus
as charmed.

So they built it. Or, nigh on to singlehandedly, Dougan did, a track
not much bigger around than the public swimming pool in Tucamcari, with
two sets of seven-tiered bleachers on the eastern side so that paying
spectators would not have to peer like nuclear-test observers into a
blazing sun when the evening races started and the first nine to twelve
Chihuahuas broke like windup toys from the miniature gates.

From the beginning, business at Chihuahua Flats Raceland boomed, even
if the dogs themselves failed in heat after heat to have a like impact
on the sound barrier. Breeders from across the country fell upon Dougan
and Chalverus's little town to strut their dogs and place flashy wagers.
By mid-April, sometimes as many as two hundred people occupied the stands;
and on that redletter night in early May when the one-thousand-and-first
Chihuahua hit the track for its maiden handicap, the raceland noted
the event with a barrel drawing, a cowboy band from Portales, and a
videocassette giveaway.

Dougan announced. As the bell rang to start each heat, he intoned over
the public-address system, "There ... goes ... Ricky!" and the
mechanical rat that paced the Chihuahuas on a mobile pole lurched out
to a herky-jerky lead, heading around the track via a concatenation
of twitches and fits. Maybe a dozen times since the raceland's opening,
the lead Chihuahua had caught, or caught up to, Ricky, but owing to
the rat's size -- it stood almost as high at the withers as the pursuing
dogs, else even patrons with binoculars would have had a hard go seeing
it -- no dog had yet halted Ricky or dragged Ricky off its jerkily advancing
lever. Dougan thought it unlikely that even a pack of Chihuahuas,
cooperating as stranger dogs almost never did, could pull down Ricky
and turn a decent money heat into a yelping group feed.

Dougan enjoyed calling the races, updating the odds, and introducing
such celebs as the owner of the biggest local car dealership, the latest
homecoming queen, and the weatherman at the NBC affiliate in El Paso.
But Conchos, the winner of four tiptop stakes races and a first or second
runnerup in several others, liked Dougan no better. Floodlamps burned
through half their nights, and Chalverus often seemed distracted by
success, drunk on the picayune details of public relations, concessions
stocking, and the twelve thousand applicable state and federal tax laws.
Such crap made Dougan long for the desert serenity of Chihuahua Flats
before the boom. Sometimes, then, he took a beer; sometimes, even, a
hit of the hard stuff.

Chalverus throve. An interviewer from a TV newsmagazine asked her questions
against the backdrop of the sawdust track and its electronic toteboard,
the hubbub of spectators, touts, bettors, and boozy hangers-on counterpointing
the audio:

What led you to open a Chihuahua track, Ms. Chalverus?

The Chihuahuas. What else?

Why not cocker spaniels or miniature poodles?

I knew when my first hubby died thet whatever I did had to have a really
cheerful grounding in my own selfhood. It also had to like start with
the Chalverus sound. Thet was my first true ch-ch-ch-challenge.

Challenge?

To myself. To my womanly Chalverus spirit. At first, you see, I figgered
chinchillas. A chinchilla ranch. For the furs n the cheap cheeky glamour.

Okay. What killed that idea?

Havin to kill the chinchillas. Also, you cain't cuddle em. They have
a odor n they bite. You have to kill em to git any use from em. The
pelts don't come off thout you brain the varmints then flat-out strip
off their skins.

So he's happy with a thousand-and-one Chihuahuas aswarm in your
backyard?

Shore. Who wouldn't be? We're doin what we love n gittin royally flush
in the doin.

But Dougan wasn't happy, and he didn't love Chihuahua Flats Raceland,
and Conchos's spitefulness gnawed like a true raton (rat) at
his bruised and tender alma (soul). This condition was so painful,
and yet so inward, that it billyclubbed him when Chalverus, less than
a week after her interview, received a medical diagnosis of inoperable
pancreatic cancer. Before he could chew up and swallow this news, she
had to start a series of radiation and chemical treatments in Las Cruces.
Her hair let go. Her skin turned sallow and squamous. Her eyes played
daily host to floating graygreen clouds.

By the end of summer, Chalverus was so sick that it hardly mattered,
except to her, in which venue, public or private, she forsook the struggle
and died. So Dougan brought her home. PR guys, gamblers, and uninformed
Chihuahua breeders still stopped by occasionally, but all racing activity
had long since ceased, and Dougan knew in his bones that Chalverus had
contracted her terminal disease as an apology to him and a huge unrepayable
gift. He said as much, in rougher words, as Chalverus lay abed amidst
the air-conditioner drone and the brittle night hush of the desert.

Nonsense, she said. Thet's all pure nonsense.

It ain't, babe. It purely ain't.

Lissen, you. I had to've had this damn ol cancer before we even
begun our raceland. Had to've. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be this
far along to --

She stopped, not for her benefit but his. They both knew dying was
the missing fill-in-the-blank word, and even unspoken it dropped between
them like a wall.

You think I got sick apurpose?

Dougan sat with his long hands holding the insides of his knees and
his long eyes downcast in craven abashment. Even so, he managed a mortified
nod.

Sick apurpose? To give us cause to undo the nightly to-do round here?
S thet what you think? Tell me.

Yessum, I do.

I got me a cancer to make you happy?

Yessum. You're like selfless thet way.

Awright then. Let me ast you. You happy?

Course not. How could I be? You think I'd trade off my precious wife
dead jes for some lousy quiet?

Chalverus rolled her face toward Dougan on her pillow and smiled. No,
she said. I never thought thet off the top of my brain or deep down
in its kinks, neither one. Which shorely orter tell you somepin, lover.

Dougan began to cry. He kept looking down, though, and his tears plunked
the backs of his dangling hands like beads of hot candlewax.

On the bed beside Chalverus, Conchos fought to his feet, peeled back
his whiskery lip, and growled at Dougan in pitiable quivering disdain.
Chalverus took Conchos's snout between her thumb and forefinger, tugged
on his papier-mâché skull, and in spite of her weakness
easily rolled him over.

Hush thet disrespecful noise. You silly cur you.

Dougan swept a forearm across his eyes and looked over at Chalverus
with a question or maybe just a thanks.

Take care of Conchos when I go, she said. Do what you want with them
others, but save Conchos to home. Promise?

Babe, you know me. You know me.

Thet's right. I do. I shorely do. N the Lord'll repay.

A week later, eased through at least a stint of her going by old Eddie
Arnold songs and a morphine drip, Millie Chalverus forsook the struggle
and died.

Conchos, sitting on her sheeted midriff, lifted a long bittersweet
howl.

Dougan sold most of the Chihuahuas in the kennel's runs
and shut down its top two floors. He remained in Chihuahua Flats. He
remained in his late wife's house. He fed and watered Conchos, who went
on eyeing him askance, hitching growly rides on his trouser cuffs, eating
his socks, and awakening him from dreams of Chalverus with vampire nips
at his earlobes, fingers, and groin. But Dougan forbore, in obedience
to the deathbed charge, Take care of Conchos.

One evening a month after the funeral, Chalverus appeared to Dougan
in the kennel yard as he played hose water over the concrete in slate-thin
tides. In haltertop, pedal pushers, and a wavery cape, she hovered three
feet off the ground between a storage shed and the multilevel runs.
Her image had so little substance, so little hue, that it looked to
have faded from a hard medium like china onto a flimsy one like rice
paper or old silk. It rippled as it hung, melting and remanifesting
in the twilight like a Jornada del Muerto mirage.

Dougan, she said. Dougan.

This voice -- no question that it was hers -- sounded distant and tinny,
like Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio. The voice startled him,
though, even more than had the apparition. It startled him so much that
he unwittingly put his thumb over the hose's nozzle and sprayed the
floating eidolon of his wife with a piercing burst. Chalverus billowed
backward, dissolving on the fusillade, and then came together again,
wavering, much dimmer than before.

Babe, I'm sorry, he cried. Real real sorry.

I cain't stay, she said. I ain't got the strenth. But I'm with you
always anyways n won't ever wholly depart.

Like Jesus? he said.

Lissen, honey, I love you. Even if, as thisere proclaimin shade, I've
got to fade off to Lethe. So to speak.

Adios! she called in her fading cathedral-radio voice. To God,
my darlin!

When Dougan went inside that night, Conchos stood guarding the circular
bed. The dog growled, feinting forward and back. Dougan opened the top
drawer in his chest-of-drawers, found his gloves, pulled them on.

Hush, you popeyed rat, he said. Then he picked Conchos up, carried
him in outstretched hands to the bedroom door, set him down gently in
the hall, and, ashamed for even considering such an act, slammed the
door on him with a bang that shook windows and toppled bric-a-brac.
He slept soundly, though, a dreamless slumber of scouring purity.

In the morning, Conchos greeted Dougan with a wriggly butt, a toothy
Chihuahua grin, and an ecstatic four-footed jig. When Dougan walked
to the kitchen, Conchos followed at heel, yipping in excitement and
homage rather than in provocation or spleen. Outdoors, Conchos took
care of business in two minutes flat and returned to the utility room
for breakfast. When Dougan poured N.R.G. Chunkletz into his bowl, Conchos
licked Dougan's hands; when Dougan pivoted to leave, Conchos reared
up and begged for a noggin rub.

What in heavenly rip's got into you?

Mmm, Conchos whined. Mmm mmm mmm.

And Dougan knew. Chalverus had sent him a comforter. He let Conchos
finish eating, then scooped him up, perched him in the crook of his
arm, and took a reminiscent stroll through every room in the house and
across every sandy stretch of his and Chalverus's arid acreage, however
Gila-monster-haunted or boobytrapped with cacti. As they went, Dougan
murmured sweet nothings to the dog, and Conchos rode like a raj in a
howdah, lordly as all get-out. From that day forward, in fact, Conchos
went everywhere with Dougan.

Dougan and Mosquero held a long wary look. Conchos perched attentively
in his swivel chair, a lopsided grin on his snout. Dougan sat again,
and Mosquero resumed cutting his hair with a sharp sclip! of
the scissors.